I’ve found the following packages for less than $100 (there are more expensive professional packages targeting publishing houses that cost around $600).
Does anyone here have or use either of these on a Mac? Integration with Scrivener workflow for nonfiction manuscripts?
Be extra wonderful if such indexing were built right into Scrivener and was tightly integrated into the find and find collection features such that the index would be dynamic and useful as a symantic mapping tool (see what your docs are about) and allow the writer to navigate via symantic concordance (and not just for export, publication, “compile”).
As an aside, Scrivener already supports very basic indexing, which is probably about like what you’d get in a word processor—you can mark index keys, or flag readable words as keys. It involves using Scrivener’s Markdown compile integration, which the post walks you through setting up if you’ve never used that before. With text that uses styles for all non-paragraph formatting, it can be used without much general awareness of Markdown too, if that isn’t something you’re personally interested in using.
But as with word processors, it is pretty basic and will not offer some of the more sophisticated and useful features a dedicated package will. I’ve never used one myself, so I can’t offer any tips there, but figured that it’s good to note that for those with basic needs, you aren’t stuck compiling and then doing all of the indexing on the final copy, which would essentially mean abandoning the Scrivener project given how much work that would entail.
When I have to create an index, if a professional one is not involved, then my starting point is the notes that the late W Richard Steven’s (a lamented UNIX author) used for his several excellent books on programming in the UNIX environment and networking. His family, friends, and colleagues keep his indexing notes online at http://www.kohala.com/start/indexing.html and while the specifics are geared to using troff/groff to prepare indexes the process remains valid. If it were me these days I would do the indexing using LaTeX compiled out of Scrivener.
For simple indexing you use a character style in Scrivener (similar to @AmberV great instructions for LibreOffice), and this inserts the correct #index[markup] at compile. The process would be similar for LaTeX…
